Six Greeks in Top 10 of Historical Personalities

What are the names that are mentioned more often than any other names in human history? That was one of the questions examined in an extensive study conducted by Pantheon, the new media lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Is it possible that Aristotle and Plato are more important to humanity than Jesus Christ? No one can answer that. Jesus Christ is the most popular figure in human history, yet, the names of the two Greek philosophers have been mentioned more often than Jesus Christ in the past 6,000 years.

The study analyzed the cultural significance of historical personalities from 4,000 BC until 2010 in order to find the most popular personalities that influenced humanity in a positive way through their work and heritage. What is impressive is that six Greeks are featured on the top-10 list.

2 COMMENTS

Popularity is very important to leftists. What matters is contribution though. In practice religious figures like Jesus, Moses and Mohammed contributed nothing. Both their physics and ethics were mostly flawed. And anything good they said was said by someone else in earlier times. Had none of them existed it is very likely our standard of living and technology could be far further ahead. Fundamentalists Christians (to lessor degree Muslims and Jews) were responsible for oppressing many of the magnificent intellectual achievements of antiquity during middle ages. It was only because religious extremism started to fall out of fashion and renewal of interest in achievements of ancient Greeks during the Renaissance did we start to move forward rather than backward again.

If one wants to put a hierarchy on things…. the biggest contributors to humanity falls between the great philosophers and the scientists. We can live civilized without Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques but we can’t do the same without physicists and a reasoned examination of ethics.